n3wjack's spurts of the mind and other geeky ramblings

the ultimate android space clearing guide

If you’re running into that annoying problem where you can’t install yet another awesome app on your Android phone because you are running out of space, here’s the ultimate guide to freeing up app space *dramatic music*

1. Clean up app cache

Your phone stores apps on its internal memory card (not RAM, but the disk) including some temporary data for each app. That cached data is the first thing you can go and remove to free up space. Depending on the app, this can be quite some data. Think apps that download resources like video or images, create thumbnails etc.

You can do this manually with the internal app settings screens and go over each app individually. I bet you have better things to do though. Instead you can install ES Task Manager, which has a cache cleaner built-in and does the job for you. Sweet. There are plenty of alternative cache cleaning tools available if you don’t like the ES one.

2. Move apps to the external memory card

Still not enough space? Damn. To free up space on the internal memory card, you can also move some apps to the external card. If you have that option, you can use the application tools to move apps individually. Not all apps support this and it usually doesn’t free up all the space either. There’s always some core files that stay on the internal drive, so don’t expect any miracles. The best way to go about it, is to sort the apps by size and try to move the biggest ones first. But if that doesn’t do the trick you might want to…

3. Uninstall some apps

Yep. Makes sense doesn’t it. The bigger the better too. It sucks, but there’s probably some stuff in there you haven’t used in months. Time to say goodbye and press the delete button. Aah, instant free space.

4. When all else fails.

Still not working? I had that. My internal memory was showing 250MB of free space and I couldn’t get a 40MB app like Chrome to update anymore. Same thing with any other app around that size. They all failed to update.
It doesn’t make sense when you look at the numbers, but my guess is that it’s like with a fragmented disk drive on a PC. At some point there isn’t a large enough open space to fit the update file in one piece. Or that 250MB of free space isn’t just for apps. I’m not sure. But what I am sure is that resetting the phone wipes the internal disk space, and frees everything up again.